How Dad and His Cousin Solved the World’s Problems
One summer morning Helen’s black convertible with wings slowly came to a stop in front of our glassed-in porch.
“Are your parents at home?”
I nodded and ran into the farmhouse kitchen.
“Helen’s here.”
Helen came in behind me. She never knocked on the door and neither did any of our other relatives. We’d just come into each other’s kitchens and yell, “We’re here!”
“Take a seat,” Dad said to his cousin, as if she needed any prompting. He sat down in his corner chair between the table and the counter that held his radio and the latest Bangor Daily News.
Helen sat opposite Dad and dropped her canary yellow handbag on the floor next to her canary yellow shoes. Her platinum blond hair was neatly coiffed, pixie style, and her left hand sparkled with the diamond from her late husband.
“How’s it going?” Dad asked.
“Well,” Helen began, leaning over the table, “Dicky said that Rob got in trouble last night at the Plymouth.”
“No!” Dad said, shaking his head. “What’d he do now?”
“He was dancing with another man’s wife.”
“Ain’t that going’ some,” Dad said, under his breath.
Helen lit her first cigarette in the house, and Mom ran to get one of her glass ash trays. She placed it next to Helen’s right hand.
Helen blew smoke out from her lips in a small circle, like she had been practicing for decades. She held the cigarette delicately and smiled.
“And then, after a few dances, he got into a fight with her husband.”
“No!”
“Yes! Knocked him out cold.”
The Plymouth Hotel, Fort Fairfield, Maine.
By now, I wasn’t listening to Helen’s tales of what had gone on the night before at the local hotel that everyone called Peyton Place—named after the TV show filled with gossip and wild living.
I was amazed that she had even grown up on the very farm I was growing up on, decades earlier, earning money by selling hens’ eggs and buying her first piano. Her father and mother had owned the farm for years before selling it to their nephew, my dad.
Helen went on to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music and marrying a New York businessman. He had spied her singing at a nightclub one night and fell in love at first sight.
But here she was, a rather youngish widow, tending to her aging parents who still came back to Maine every summer and wintered in Florida. You’d think she’d be bored coming back to the little town with her parents, but she seemed to relish connecting with her cousins and old girlfriends and, most of all, swapping the latest and most savory town news.
Internet was not even dreamed about back in those 1960s summers. But my father and Helen didn’t need the internet. They had something better, more exciting, and in a way, more honest.
“You. Don’t. Mean it,” Helen said, jolting me back to reality.
“Yes, sir.” Dad nodded his head. He looked like a little boy who had just told a really big fib. Instead, he was relating what someone had told him the night before about a business closing in Caribou.
Helen only used that phrase when she was super impressed, and Dad had succeeded in super impressing his cousin.
“You don’t say!” she added.
Located partly in Fort Fairfield and partly in New Brunswick.
Helen’s alto voice droned on about stocks in New York and companies doing well and conversations with her broker. Dad shook his head again. "Mister man!"
She looked down at her watch. “I’m meeting the girls at the club house for brunch before a round of golf." She picked up her cigarette pack and tapped it one last time on the table. "I’ll see you, Freddy, in a day or so.”
She pulled her purse strap over her shoulder and smiled at me and Mom. “Good seeing you! Have a good day!”
As soon as the Cadillac left the driveway, Mom grabbed the ash tray, threw the butts out the back window, and opened the front door for cross ventilation. Dad put on his straw hat and headed towards the machine shop, beyond the barns.
He and Helen had cleared the air on local news and gossip and tried to make sense of the world. To them, discussing things face to face was better than anything else.